Musings from southern New Mexico

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… wants to cast aside the government regulation that makes places like Sweden unlivable hellholes in favor of the laissez-faire approach to governing that can be found flourishing in such capitalistic paradises as the Congo.

I think I have about had it with politics. Most of the people with whom I occasionally discuss politics seem to have less thought into choosing a political side than they had on choosing a football team to cheer. The Republican platform would accelerate the transfer of the nations wealth to the wealthiest and away from everyone else. What the rubes (meaning anyone earning less than about $1,000,000 per year) don’t realize is that this transfer is not to the 1% as the dirty hippies claim. Rather, it is to the top 0.1%. At least I think they don’t understand. It’s possible that denizens of the low-to-mid tiers of the upper-class are simply willing to allow their own piece of the pie to shrink so long as that of the filthy peasants shrinks at a much faster rate. Cast thus, the merely rich are gaining relative to the filthy peasants. And for some people, that is all that matters.

I think I should end my political voice with a definition:

Politics – the collected methods used by the powerful to dupe citizens into voting against self-interest.

I only wish I had the lack of ethics required to personally profit in the willful ignorance of others, or the lack of dignity required to be a token minority scientist bootlick for the anti-science party.

This is a theory that I’ve heard variously phrased over the past few years. It is not any truer now than it was when the people failed to revolt over Hitler’s death camps, or the late night disappearance of Stalin’s enemies, or the tragic absurdity of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” When a voice is given to those people at the periphery of sanity, people who would otherwise keep their craziness to themselves feel that they can now unleash the crazy. Free of the fetters of the expectations of polite society, the followers of Limbaugh or Hannity can break out the racist language and use it to incite maximum response from the brainwashed audience.

I have heard people express a hope that if, after the election, women who lose the fundamental right to do what they want to do with their reproductive parts will be so outraged, they will swing the next election.

I really wish I had watched the first debate. I only saw snippets, with Obama looking distracted and Romney sounding like a competent politician. I just can’t get up the motivation to see it. It’s like watching a game from earlier in the season. I would be interested. From what I saw of it, Romney did seem presidential. The second one, he looked clearly overmatched. This final debate, however, he simply looked like an oily salesman (literally, too. Why was he so sweaty?) who knows his pitch is falling flat. I would compare him to a desperate salesman trying to make a pitch to the board of directors while a hostile board member shreds his spiel. It was weird.

I noticed this afternoon that my entire website had disappeared. After a bit of fiddling with the host tech support, I found out that there was some work being done on the server. I guess this sort of thing happens, but it is always somewhat disconcerting to find out that something on which you have spent a great deal of time is simply gone. Still, for a few hours, I was really bothered.